Sunday, May 14, 2006

Local Heroes

Abbey Mills did me and my guests proud yesterday the kids had a great afternoon painting with Tess and ARTTess, and then Garfield fed us five adults and six children and hosted us into the evening at Ting 'n Ting.

It is difficult though for me to give either of them the mad props they are due because neither has a website. Here endeth the first lesson.

Did you know that Tim Berners-Lee - the father of the web has a blog? In a recent post he said,


Do you have a URI for yourself? If you are reading this blog and you have the ability to publish stuff on the web, then you can make a FOAF page, and you can give yourself a URI.

This has been nagging at the back of my mind, because I have no very clear idea what he means, which is something I ought to own up to before I start nagging people to set up web sites so that I can link to them.

In general I must admit that everything that TBL is trying to do with the Semantic Web and Resource Descriptor Frameworks has left me floundering in its wake.

I've been brooding a little on the Semantic Web today, after I got a call from my brother at Colliers Wood tube station early this morning to say that the line to Waterloo was closed and that his party were going to have to get two cabs to hustle them to town to get their Eurotunnel train on time. I felt a bit embarrassed about this becaue it was me who had advised them to get the tube when the information about engineering works was available all the time from Transport for London.

Later on I got hugely delayed driving into London because I hadn't heard about the Chelsea Victory Parade or the Strokes Association's London Bridges Bike Ride 2006. It does seem ridiculous that our networks and computers can't warn us about problems like that. I suppose that is the promise of the Semantic Web, which also reminds me that Bill Gates called for a directions microformat in his speech at Mix06. (It is also worth knowing that the Transport for London Journey Planner knows about the engineering works and tells you that the best route around them for today so it should be quite simple to double check a route automatically against that before setting off for example.)

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